“In Chicago we’re accustomed to weather extremes, with very cold winters and very hot summers, so the animals that are part of our zoo are chosen for their hardiness for winter or summer,” [public relations director Sharon] Dewar says. “But this is obviously an excessive extreme. So even animals that are pretty hardy, and would be able to stay outside for normal winters — like the Mongolian camels and polar bear — even those animals we’re keeping indoors.”

I’ll just repeat that: It’s so cold in Chicago, the polar bear is inside.

Thank Ceiling Cat that it’s been balmy in Poland. I got out at just the right time.

We had a blizzard last night with the cold and had to clear the driveway several times because of drifting snow. We also had ice storms just before Xmas that knocked out power for many people who had to go to warming centres. You don’t get to have cold weather and no storms….it’s forbidden somehow.🙂

That is why I specified “no wind”. In Kabul, in the 1971-1972 winter (the coldest they had had in 25 years), when the temperature was -35 but there was no wind and the air was dry, one could go out wearing just a T-shirt when the sun shone.

Captive polar bears, being fed on fish instead of seal, often have less blubber than their wild counterparts as well. This serves them very well in summer, but means that in cold like this, inside they must go.

I once experienced -40. My car overheated. I checked the coolant level only to find that there was green jello in my radiator.

So I started walking. I was in 60s era US Air Force issue Arctic Flight Line gear. At first I thought I would be fine, then I had to turn into the wind. That was when I started to get worried. It was very hard to see because my eye lashes kept freezing together from tearing and blinking, and I had a revelation about just what the oft heard, but not really understood, phrase “the cold cut through like a knife” means. This was about 4-6 hours into a storm that dropped 70 inches (178 cm) of snow in 24 hours.

Lucky for me some kind soul in a properly outfitted 4 x 4, who was out looking for idiots like me, picked me up and gave me a ride home.

Once when I was a student, I tried to hit frozen slush off my car’s mud flaps at -20C or so. It split the mud flap. Then I tried to scrap ice with my plastic scraper and hit something accidentally – the scraper shattered.

I keep trying to tell everybody that temperatures just don’t go negative, what with that being a physical impossibility and all, but nobody ever listens. And all this stuff about F and C being equal at some given temperature — nonsense! Everybody knows that C is about a third of F; no need for any fancy math at terrestrial-scale temperatures.

It’s been getting down to the mid-40s here overnight, and that’s cold. Can’t imagine what it must be like in those arctic regions where it makes it down to the 20s, or even teens — that’s when you turn into a popsicle within 37 seconds unless you’re wrapped in five layers of electric blankets, right?

Oh, Ben Goren, hoo, hoo, ha ha. Please stop. I can’t stand it splitting a gut reading your stuff up here in Minneapolis where yesterday the wind chill was -50F (yes, I said MINUS fucking 50; I had no idea you were such an absolutist!) and the temp bottomed out at -(note minus sign)32 C, by advanced math. You just wait for May/June when the temps down there climb to 100, 105, 110 F and see what sympathy you get while we up here luxuriate in 70, 75 F! BTW, Phoenix is the only place I’ve ever been spritzed – automatically no less – in an outdoor cafe; made me feel like a cabbage in the supermarket. Also, Phoenix is the only place I’ve been in a couple decades where my hotel did NOT ask me to help conserve water?!? What’s up with that!

Oh, May is loverly with the regular flirtation with 100° highs, and June is great summertime weather with it mostly staying in the lower triple digits. July gets a tad warm; above 110° is common, but even that’s not so bad. It’s generally never more than several days that it starts to get slightly uncomfortable — say, much over 115° — and truly hot weather (120°+) is as unusual as the deep freeze the rest of the country is in right now.

August…August tends to suck, since the temperatures are around the same level as July, but the Monsoon season brings humidity. 110° with 50%+ humidity is no picnic. But the good news is that, whenever it gets really bad in August, we almost always get a storm within a day or so to give everything a wonderfully thick coating of caked-on dust. Woo-hoo!

Local attitudes towards water conservation are problematic, I’ll admit. We have way too many golf courses, too much big agriculture (did you know that there’re more roses grown in Arizona than I think anywhere else in the States? not to mention all the citrus and cotton — cotton!), and too many private swimming pools and lawns. We’re sucking dry not just the Colorado River, but local aquifers faster than they’re being replenished, such that we’re going to be in deep shit in coming decades if we don’t do something about it yesterday.

The cold is over the entire country other than the Pacific Coast and southern Florida. Unfortunately, we have all learned about the “polar vortex” – which has reached all the way down to Atlanta. It has warmed up today in Chicago – to -1F (-19C). On Friday, temperature is supposed to get above freezing – 32F (0C).